1000 Dirham Notes

Not long after I got here I posted scans of all the paper money except the 1000 dirham ones (and of course the photo site that I was using then has gone kaput and I don't have those images anymore, so I have to rescan them), so, not long before I leave, for the sake of completeness, here are the what the 1000s look like:

Commemorative Dirhams

This are some commemorative dirhams that I have gotten and what the back of a dirham looks like:

Back


10 Year aniversary of the Higher Colleges of Technology


50 years of formal education


35 years of the National Bank of Abu Dhabi


25 years of production at Total Abu Al Bukhoosh

Notes

OK, I posted pictures of the coins, here are the notes. All of the notes have an Arabic side and an English side:

500 AED



100 AED



50 AED



20 AED



10 AED



5 AED

Coins

These are the main coins that get used in the UAE:

1 Dirham (new)




1 Dirham (old)


The only difference that I can tell is that the new dirham coin is smaller.


50 fils (.5 dirham)



25 fils (.25 dirham)



In all my time here (a whole month now) I have been given exactly one coin smaller than a 25 fils, a 10 fils one. This is despite the fact that the stores routinely sell things with prices like 12.95 AED. So the cashiers round the price off, sometimes giving you more than your change, sometimes less. Admittedly, 10 fils and less aren't worth a lot (10 fils is about 2.7 cents). But it seems like this would really throw off their till counts at the end of the day. John Chilton wrote about this and an effort to get rid of the smaller coins back in April, if you want to read more.